I am back...Submitted by ed on Fri, 09/25/2009 - 12:22 |
After a month of downtime, courtesy of my host, my service has finally been fully restored. It is great to be back tho there is much catching up that has to be done. There is much to share which I plan to do this weekend.
Thanks for returning and I am excited to finally resume my posts.
The email that took ZZhosting.com a month to send out to people:
The main issue we had with restoring customer data during the hardware crash was the backups were held in a non-compressed format, we had the backup plan in place but had yet to utilize it on a mass scale meaning it was largely untested. By storing backups in a non-compressed format it meant that every single file had to be transferred across our network one by one rather than just an entire compressed file being transferred and then un-compressed. This meant that accounts that should have taken 5 minutes to restore took 50 minutes; this was our biggest issue with the entire restore process.
Since I have come back from holiday we have spent the last several days buying new software and setting it up to ensure that this can NEVER happen to our customers again. Our communication was unacceptable during this downtime, unfortunately this failure happened whilst I was on holiday with limited access to the Internet those who were left in charge failed to provide customers with accurate and instant information like our customers are used to; this was not acceptable and we have put in place a new management structure to avoid poor communication in the future.
We have now purchased ' Continous Data Protection ® ' software from R1Soft, this will now allow us to not only restore the entire operation system and customer data but also create snapshots of customer data as it is updated. We now run daily backups on all of our shared servers in order to secure all of our customer’s data, previously we only offered weekly backups but we do not think this is good enough for our customers. Our NAS with over 20TB of available storage will hold all backups for 14 days before erasing them; this means that you will be able to request backups from specific dates if you make a change to your site that you did not mean to.
I want to thank everyone who has stuck by us in this incredibly trying time for the company, we have only learnt from this experience and unfortunately it has come at your expense but to quote Friedrich Nietzsche - ' That which does not kill us makes us stronger. '
Kind Regards,
Andrew Turnbull
I will still look at another hosting company...
